The Tenth at Gettysburg

On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, 150 years ago today, as the northern and southern armies were beginning to collide in what would become the turning point of the war, the Tenth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment (which I’ve been checking in on, here and here) was in Manchester, Maryland taking the day off. The unit had just spent several days of “severe marching” to get north from the Rappahannock River in Virginia to meet General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the north, but as the regimental history notes, things would start to happen very fast.

“At eight o’clock in the evening, and just as the men were turning in for a night’s rest, the loud, clear notes of the bugle awoke them to the fact that their marching was not yet done. Immediately came the verbal order, heard so often, to ‘pack up and fall in immediately.’ In an amazing short space of time they were in line; a few brief moments, and the column filed into the road en route for Gettysburg, to re-enforce the Union army. The distance was about thirty miles, and the First Corps was already engaged, and the time allowed to get there was a brief as possible. In view of this fact, the leader of the column felt obliged to take the wrong road and march some four miles out of the way. Eight miles extra march for tired soldiers, is not pleasant to think of, especially in hot weather, but it had to be made, and with as much expedition as possible.

They marched until daylight, when they halted and were told they had three-quarters of an hour to get breakfast.”

(Someone retraced this famous overnight march and wrote about it here).

They were quickly put into a quiet part of the line, and were later sent to reinforce the infamous Little Round Top late in the afternoon, once the fighting in that area had begun to settle down. However, a stray bullet caused the regiment’s one death in the battle: Sergeant Alvah C. Phillips of Company E, 22, a butcher from Brattleboro, was shot in the chest. The regiment remained on the hill for the rest of the night.

On the morning of the third day, July 3, the Tenth and the Thirty-Seventh Massachusetts Regiment (also made up of western Massachusetts companies) were held in reserve “and marched from point to point, to strengthen any weakness in the line, at one time passing under the concentrated fire of more than a hundred pieces of rebel cannon.” Two men from the Tenth were hurt in all this shuffling about under fire: Corporal William H. Day of Company F, from Easthampton, was wounded in the left leg (he would later become a saloonkeeper in Huntington) and Franklin B. Mason of Company D, from Windsor, who was wounded in the foot (he would go on to become a clerk in a dry goods store in North Adams). But the the regimental history notes that “several [more] of the men were hit by pieces of shell, and knocked down, but not much injured.”